'You Can’t Make Me Do It!' Consumer Social Distancing Compliance Behavior

Vijay Payal Bharti*, M. Paula Fitzgerald, and Elizabeth T. Gratz

John Chambers College of Business and Economics, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506

Presentation Category: Oral-Human Engagement (Oral Presentation #10)

Student’s Major: Organizational Leadership

The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) identifies social distancing as an essential behavior to slow the spread of COVID-19. However, as the high counts of noncompliance indicate, marketers (broadly defined as retailers, personal services providers, healthcare providers, and restaurants) have struggled to enforce these guidelines. We explore consumer attitudes towards social distancing using tweets and survey data to address our primary research question: What drives social distancing behavior and evaluations of communications that encourage social distancing? This study is particularly timely due to the advent of more contagious variants, which may require greater compliance to prevent their spread. In Study 1 (Linguistic analysis), individual tweets (n = 22,230) using two terms, Social Distance and COVID, were collected from March 3 to August 30, 2020. LIWC results showed significant variance in Analytic, Clout, Authentic, and Tone in consumer communications regarding social distancing, which indicates that consumers use a variety of rhetorical methods. For Study 2 (Experimental study), our results show that political ideology, mediated by perceptions of restricted freedom, feelings of complacency resulting from low-risk perceptions and COVID fatigue, and perceived ethicality of social distancing impact compliance with social distancing. Therefore, we suggest marketers use communications encouraging social distancing that emphasizes the ethical choice to socially distance, which may positively impact others. For example, “Choose to protect your family and friends by social distancing” is likely to be more palatable to both conservatives and progressives than “Follow Federal Distancing Guidelines because it is necessary for our community.”

Funding: West Virginia University

Program/mechanism supporting research/creative efforts: Other, HONORS Excel Program